Showing results for "michael dirda"

by

Michael Dirda

With infectious enthusiasm, "the best read person in America"—as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda has been called—aims to rekindle our passion for classic works of adventure, mystery, fantasy and romance.Kidnapped, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Kim, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Trent’s Last Case, Captain Blood, The Enchanted Castle, The Man Who Was Thursday—these are just a few of the many wonderful works recl...

by

Michael Dirda

"As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again," the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic discusses the rewards of reading books ( Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice).Once out of school, most of us read for pleasure. Yet there is another equally important, though often overlooked, reason that we read: to learn how to live. Though books have always been understood as life-teachers, the exact way in which...

by

Michael Dirda

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). His latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on a life in literature. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics ar...

by

Poul Anderson

This acclaimed fantasy classic of men, elves, and gods is at once breathtakingly exciting and heartbreakingly tragic."One of the most influential fantasies I have ever read." —World Fantasy Award–winning author Michael MoorcockPublished the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword draws on similar Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon sources.In his greed for land and power, Orm the Strong s...

by

Michael Dirda

Series -

Writers on Writers

From Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda, a delightful introduction to the creator of Sherlock HolmesA passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars—the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider's accoun...

by

Claude Houghton, Michael Dirda

"So remarkable in truth is this novel that I cannot understand why it is not universally known and admired." - Hugh Walpole"I Am Jonathan Scrivener remains a tantalizing, highly diverting philosophical novel of rare elegance and wit." - Michael DirdaJames Wrexham is thirty-nine, lonely, and stuck in a dead-end job when he comes upon an advertisement for a position as secretary to Mr. Jonathan Scrivener. Much to his surprise, he is hired at a lavish salary despite never even...

by

John Dickson Carr

Series -

Sir Henry Merrivale Mysteries

When a spiritual medium is murdered in a locked hut on a haunted estate, Sir Henry Merrivale seeks a logical solution to a ghostly crime.Plague Court is old and crumbling, long neglected after its lord, hangman's assistant Louis Playge, fell victim to the black death hundreds of years before. Famously haunted by Playge's ghost, the property finally has a new owner and banishing the spirit is the first order of business. And when the medium employed with this task is...

by

Pamela Hansford Johnson, CBE, FRSL

It’s not easy being a genius. Just ask Daniel Skipton, the greatest—or, let us say, the most under-recognized—novelist of his generation. Skipton is only a few revisions away from finishing his masterpiece: a satire of literary London that will humiliate his enemies and make him as famous, and as rich, as he deserves. Yet, in the meantime, he is forced to scrape by in obscurity and self-imposed exile amid the deserted canals of Bruges, barely surviving on a regimen of blackmail, bullying, ...

by

Mervyn Wall, Michael Dirda

Hailed by critic E. F. Bleiler as a "landmark book in the history of fantasy," Mervyn Wall's classic The Unfortunate Fursey (1946) is set in 11th century Ireland, where the forces of evil have launched an assault on the monastery of Clonmacnoise. Their task is made easier by the fact that one hapless monk, the simple-minded Brother Fursey, cannot manage to pronounce the necessary words of exorcism. When the other monks discover this, the unfortunate Fursey is expelled and sets forth on the...

by

Michael Dirda

Narrated by

John Lescault

From Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life—the perfect companion for any lover of books.Michael Dirda has been hailed as “the best-read person in America” by the Paris Review and “the best book critic in America” by the New York Observer. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he was awarded for his reviews in the Washington Post, and he picked up an Edgar Award from t...

by

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Series -

Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

All four legendary Sherlock Holmes novels, collected in a unique Graphic Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Michael DirdaThough endlessly reinterpreted, reinvented, and imitated, the Sherlock Holmes stories have never been surpassed. Sporting his signature billowing coat and pipe in hand, the genius investigator Holmes captivates readers with his alluring melancholy and superhuman intuition, while his partner, Dr. Watson, remains ever the perfect foil, a classi...

by

Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel

Translated by

Peter Constantine

"Amazing not only as literature but as biography." —Richard Bernstein, The New York TimesOne of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from t...